Low Gaul morale

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Good post, Geticus!

I have to impose house rules on myself to stop winning battles so easily on medium battle difficulty. In a half-stack army of 10 units, I permit myself to have only one unit of slingers and only one unit of skirmisher light cavalry. This stops them dominating the battlefield - they can soften up the enemy, but the main part of the work still has to be done by line infantry, swordsmen and spearmen. My main use for slingers is as town garrisons - they are only allowed out to fight nearly rebels.

[Trax]

About the flaming arrows.

I only use them when defending in sieges.
Flaming arrows in field battles is IMHO just another vanilla absurdity.
Only slightly less silly than flaming pigs.

Certainly not something to use when playing a realism mod.

[vartan]

About the flaming arrows.

I only use them when defending in sieges.
Flaming arrows in field battles is IMHO just another vanilla absurdity.
Only slightly less silly than flaming pigs.

Certainly not something to use when playing a realism mod.

Precisely. It's just one more of those things one considers when writing up a set of boundaries in a tournament. I don't think it was considered last year, but it could be barred from use if people come to a consensus.

[Geticus]

Good post, Geticus!

I have to impose house rules on myself to stop winning battles so easily on medium battle difficulty. In a half-stack army of 10 units, I permit myself to have only one unit of slingers and only one unit of skirmisher light cavalry. This stops them dominating the battlefield - they can soften up the enemy, but the main part of the work still has to be done by line infantry, swordsmen and spearmen. My main use for slingers is as town garrisons - they are only allowed out to fight nearly rebels.

Yeah I hear you, I suppose it depends on how you want to play. I like infantry slugfests but I find cavalry dominance to be very satisfying , and I think that ancient warfare tended to work that way at the higher level-- Assyrians and Egyptians were chariot dominant, Alexander raised Hellenic warfare to the next level with elite cavalry charge power, and Hannibal's supremacy in the field over the Romans was based on strategic mastery all around but above all IMO on cavalry superiority over the declining and increasingly mercantile Roman equestrian class. Numidian light cav played a big part. But beyond I suppose it's just the way my Gallic style developed, I originally wasn't interested in Leuke epos due to their low stats, but used them just to have some cavalry to mop up fleeing enemies. But eventually I ran two or three on one flank and started micromanaging the cavalry wing and found that their skirmish first-charge later worked real well at slowing down the enemy approach, it's a kind of missile trap with sling bullet rain from the front and light cavalry javelins from the flank and back, turn to face the Leuke epos and the slingers eat you alive, continue charging the slingers and my light cav shoot you down in the back, which is where the speed, maneuverability and missile count of the Leuke epos wins out. The other thing is to be able to "devour" isolated opponent troops by simultaneously charging them from 2 or 3 sides at the same time. This is pretty micromanagement intensive but the stakes are huge, because a well timed 2x or 3x cavalry charge can annihilate an enemy cohort in 5 or 6 seconds. Do this a few times on one flank and it leads to an easy win, and I find that AP high lethality chargers with very good stamina are the best at it, and Leuke epos are the kings in Europe. In fact I have done many battles, especially siege defenses, where I lead out an FM + 2 or 3 leuke epos against a Sweboz horde (2 or 3 thousand+ with no FM, lots of low tier levies, the usual Rhineland Sweboz spam) and wipe them all out by getting uphill of them, routing their cavalry (if any), charge/routing the archers whenever possible, and javelin skirmishing the infantry masses so that they are a little dispersed and tired, and devouring one isolated troop after another with 3 way triangular charges led by the FM with Leuke epos hitting flanks/rear. The morale loss from troops routing becomes contagious and the FM keeps trampling through one troop into the next and the Leuke Epos keep dive bombing the flanks, any tired infantry that come up to help out in the routezone get morale loss contagion and route pretty quick from FM contact and leuke epos flank/rear charge. At the end of the battle there are 2 or 3 thousand plus casualties all by cavalry since I don't have the patience to draw out the swordsmen and slingers against mostly low grade spam infantry. All this is just a lesser version of proper steppe tactics and in reality the kings of cavalry warfare IMO are Sarmatian warlords and Roxolani riders, but they are out on the steppes and their economy and infantry suck, so I find that Gauls have a good combination off all- decent heavy cav, good light cav, good economy, high lethality durable heavy infantry and cheap long range missile troops. So in Eurobarb warfare I see the Gauls having a small edge over the Sweboz, and if the Aedui/Arverni win the civil war in Gaul quickly and mobilize everything for a blitz on Rome, I see that war between Roma and Gaul as determining the superpower in west Europe. If the Gauls pillage Rome and wipe out the Romans completely by 257 or so I give them a slight edge to hold off the Casse and Sweboz, build supercities in Gaul and get Time of Soldiers by the mid 240s, and overpower all Europe with Neitos-Arjos-Helvetian phalanx-Gaesatae battlelines thereafter.

[vartan]

Geticus if you can consistently pull that off, that is, the flawless intertwining of skirmisher cavalry and missile infantry on the multiplayer battlefield, I'm certain you would find yourself a line of men waiting to battle you! It sounds exciting.

[Unintended BM]

I have an Aedui game going right now. The starting seems way less annoying than the Arveni starting for some reason.

Anyways, good advice, thanks. Those Leuce Epos and Celtic slingers are amazing, I already knew this from my Sweboz and Roman games.

I still think the gaul spearmen suck. I just use them as garrisons, to hold the line and to boost my numbers now, and they seem to work well enough so far against other gauls. Slingers, swordsmen and cavalry really do most of the work in my battles.

[Geticus]

I have an Aedui game going right now. The starting seems way less annoying than the Arveni starting for some reason.

Anyways, good advice, thanks. Those Leuce Epos and Celtic slingers are amazing, I already knew this from my Sweboz and Roman games.

I still think the gaul spearmen suck. I just use them as garrisons, to hold the line and to boost my numbers now, and they seem to work well enough so far against other gauls. Slingers, swordsmen and cavalry really do most of the work in my battles.

Yeah using the base levy spearmen in the field is a great way to thin out your population, little more. Some people tout the virtues of Massilian hoplites, but for me the early line consists solely of Northern and Southern Gallic longswordsmen, preferably from Bibracte where the weaponsmithy is, with slingers skirmishing in front and then retreating through the line when the opponent closes, and the cavalry wing. FM typically is the sole reserve, just skirmish and dominate the flank with Leuke epos and/or swordsmen and get 'er done.

[Geticus]

Geticus if you can consistently pull that off, that is, the flawless intertwining of skirmisher cavalry and missile infantry on the multiplayer battlefield, I'm certain you would find yourself a line of men waiting to battle you! It sounds exciting.

Thanks man, I was consistently at that level as of last December when I deleted the game, I played solo EB at a high level last year during a lot of professional downtime due to the depression here in the US, this was my game of choice most of last year until I in my opinion conclusively mastered the high lethality Eurobarb factions (I did not play Lusotannan). Though I am a Roman military historian I couldn't bring myself to play Rome since the Ped. Ex. and Campanian cavalry always bothered me, and the Polybian principes just seemed too damn good, and phalanx warfare on EB always bored me, I only cut phalanxes down, don't play them, so having pretty well played the Britons, Gauls, Sweboz and Getai at full tilt to factional victories a few times I finally quit playing and deleted the game. But EB is IMO the best tactical strategy game I have ever played, I really wonder if anything surpasses it in any genre, there is just so much historical and cultural content, and aesthetic quality, and too much intelligence packed into the game. My problem is that although I am a hardcore wargamer and play at a high level I am not all that computer literate. So I watched a lot of the tournament matches from Hamachi and enjoyed many of the matches but every time I stopped by the groups were full, and the reality is that a lot of people are playing there merely to set Cretans/sagitarii on autofire and the phalanx/hoplites/cohorts in defense mode and watch their opponents tire themselves out rather than proactively step forward and win. Very few of the many Hellenistic faction players actually use sarissa phalanxes offensively to any good effect. But if I pick the game back up I might check in with you or others and see if any one wants to get hewn down by longswords, routed by gaesatae and trodden under Celtic hooves ;) I might add that my slinger/leuke epos sandwich probably wouldn't work very well against Cretan spam and Sagitarii Auxilia, so against those types of MP players a regular infantry assault + flank surround/slaughter style would likely be necessary. If everyone on EB multiplayer played at a high level, that is all the battles would amount to, a big evolving oblique attack dominated by flank micromanagement. Defensive arrays in line would accomplish very little.
But for army micromanagement the main thing for me was that I had a system for hotkeying eurobarb army groupings, which didn't vary too much between Celtic and Getai and Sweboz armies. So I always know what keys are for my left flank infantry, center infantry, right infantry, infantry reserves (if any), left and right cavalry wings (or sometimes light and heavy cav wings) and missile groups. Typically I'd just group all slingers into one mass of three or four at hotkey 7 but sometimes with Sweboz I'd have multiple archer and slinger groups. Getai I'd have horse archers in addition to Elite Dacian/Skythian archers, but IMO as long as one is very systematic in arraying the army and hotkeying groups, then that speeds up complex multivector movements. Aside from that I use a keyboard with a circular gaming keypad on it, and customized the EB tactical controls on it, which was very useful in rapid micromanagement;)
If I pick up the game again I might come around and look you up but right now I have pretty well whooped the gaming bug. I really overplayed EB last year and I hate the CTDs, I only played on huge unit size and had CTDs every 3-4 hours, often during battles in the late game, so though I consider EB to be the elite classical strategy game, I am pretty well burnt out on it.